My Updated Book List

My 2022 Reading List

1.????Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher: The Age of AI, and our human future – Kissinger, Schmidt et al argue that AI is the “Brodie Moment” of our time.?Bernhard Brodie was the Rand strategist who first realized that the atomic bomb had completely changed not only military strategy but the world. AI arguably has the potential to do even more, changing security, economics, politics, medicine, knowledge, life, and humans. The book is good in identifying the issues and what’s possible, less so how to get the most of it and avoid the pitfalls.

2.????Fiona Hill: There is Nothing for You Here, finding opportunity in the 21st century – We got to know Fiona during the first impeachment hearings in 2019.?I loved reading this personal journey, starting from an old mining town in Northern England all the way to the Trump White House.?The title is the warning of her father, which she took to heart, the book is much more than your typical White House memoir.

3.????Anne Applebaum: Twilight of Democracy, the failure of politics and the parting of friends – One of my favourite writers on recent history and politics.?Anne tells the personal and profoundly sad and worrying story of the breakdown of democracy in the Western world.?When the Wall came down, we thought the end of history had come; now we are writing about the end of the rule of law and democratic society.?We were naive, is her point, to think it could last.

4.????Thane Gustafson: Klimat, Russia in the age of climate change – Strangely enough, there are few good books on Russia.?This one is an eye-opener, data-rich and well-written, making the convincing case that climate change and Russia’s economics dependence on fossil fuel sets up the country for utter disaster.?Makes you look at the Ukraine war with different eyes.

5.???Kevin Rudd: The Avoidable War, The dangers of a catastrophic conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China – A very timely topic, for sure. Rudd, former Australian PM, and a passionate China student argues for “managed strategic competition” between the two global superpowers.?This book is focused on finding a diplomatic framework to allow for mutual growth while avoiding major war.?Rudd is realistic and sketches no less than 10 possible outcomes for the Taiwan conflict, half of which end in military conflict.

6.???Gary Gerstle: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, America and the world in the free market era – The fascinating story of the origins, the rise and the fall of neoliberalism, reaching its peak in the years of Reagan and Thatcher and the wide-spread belief in market forces and globalization as a solution for society.?Great at describing the roots and how it impacted every part of life, less so what’s next.

7.????Diane Coyle: Cogs and Monsters, what economics is and what it should be – This is an academic and dense read, not your everyday business book. With that caveat, the book critiques traditional economics and explores the impact of everything digital on economics and economic policy.?I enjoyed it.

8.????Matthew Ball: The Meta-Verse, and how it will revolutionize everything – The problem with “everything meta” is that it’s so overhyped one tunes out. Ball’s point is that the metaverse is not just the internet with VR goggles, but rather a seamless network that in its most basic form will radically upgrade our online interaction to a 3D virtual one.?It gets scarier when Ball sketches what may follow, an existential revolution how we live, interact and run our lives and society. Very much worth trying to understand what it may mean, what is desirable and what is not.

9.????Steven Pinker: Rationality, what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters – At the surface, Pinker seems the opposite of Kahnemann & Tversky’s thesis that humans are bad and irrational in decision-making.?Pinker focuses instead on the tools that help us decides, plan and execute rationally and effectively.?A hopeful book.

10.?Chris Miller: Chip War, the fight for the world’s most critical technology – A book on the new scarce resource of our time, the “new oil”: the microchip.?A very enjoyable read, warning that control over the industry producing semiconductors is critical in safeguarding our wealth and way of living.

11.?David Graeber and David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity – As a historian, an upsetting book. The authors clearly take delight in contradicting established views how humans evolved. Based on archeological and anthropological research, it makes the point that our history is less linear than we think.?Graeber, who passed away two years ago, was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and it shows.?Their thesis is that human progress and ingenuity does not rely on hierarchies, bureaucracy, and inequality.

12.?Simon Sebag Montefiore: The World, a family history – A daunting 1,263 pages to read over the holidays …

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My 2021 Reading List

1.????Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini: Humanocracy, creating organizations as amazing as the people inside them?– I knew about this from an HBR article on the Haier Appliances case.?The tone is confident, if not a tat arrogant, but the story and the examples make a convincing and inspiring case of replacing top-down, bureaucratic chains of command with purpose-led, distributed organization models, ready for today’s ESG, empowered and digital times.

2.????Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein: Noise, a flaw in human judgment – A decade after ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, another brilliant book how people evaluate and decide, and how we can make better decisions.?Realizing how flawed our judgment is, you appreciate AI/automation much more.?The book is full of tips and strategies how to correct noise and bias.?A must-readMy!??

3.????Carlo Rovelli: Reality is Not What it Seems – Another fun, dense but readable (even for an alpha brain) book on applied physics.?If you’ve ever wanted to understand what quantum physics is about, this is a great place to start.?

4.????John Ikenberry: A World Safe for Democracy, liberal internationalism, and the crises of global order – A broad sweep and an important book on the liberal democratic world order, making the argument that our rules-based world order, while under threat, is more resilient than we think.

5.????Daniel Susskind: A World without Work, technology, automation and how we should respond – Very timely book on machines replacing humans. Susskind is an optimist, though.?We can of course all be happy that repetitive stuff will be done by machines, but Susskind goes further and believes all work is at risk.?I’m less convinced of the latter, humans are I believe unsurpassed in creativity and empathy.?Wherever you are, an important book to read.

6.????Kiran Klaus Patel: Project Europe, a history – If you want to understand how the EU came into being and how it works -- beyond all the overhyped pessimism, scepticism, or optimism for that matter -- read this book.

7.????David Goodhart: Head, Hand, Heart, the struggle for dignity and status in the 21st century - I liked this book, making the important case that we overvalue knowledge education and knowledge work in our society, and undervalue technical and emotional skills and capabilities.?As we are transitioning from fossil to clean energy and transforming every house, and as our greying societies need more and more care work, we have set ourselves up for major work shortages.

8.????Annelien De Dijn: Freedom, an Unruly History – A philosopher’s history of freedom, exploring the changing concept over time, and making the argument that our notion of freedom as restraint of state power wasn’t always so.

9.????Caroline de Gruyter: Beter Wordt Het Niet, een reis door de Europese Unie en het Habsburgse Rijk – (the English translation is on its way) This is a well written, reflective book on the parallels between the EU and the Hapsburg Empire, as seen from Brussels and Vienna, making the convincing point that messiness and slowness often hides progress, impact and longevity.

10.?Ian Buruma: The Churchill Complex, the curse of being special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit – A funny, highly readable, and perceptive book of the post WW2 relationship between the UK and the US.?Equality it was never and special was always put in brackets and one-sided.?A story of illusions.

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My 2020 Reading List

1.????Thomas Philippon: The Great Reversal, how America gave up on free markets?-- Another book by a French economist, this time on the decline of competition in the United States.?His – convincing -- thesis is that the growing concentration of corporate power and influence on politics is a key factor in understanding lack of productivity growth and the increase in inequality.

2.????George Packer: Our Man Richard Holbrooke?–?What an enjoyable book, beautifully written and about a tragic (“almost great”) larger than life figure, stomping around in the world of the Pax Americana, which – in many ways regrettably -- no longer exists.

3.????Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind; why good people are divided by politics and religion –?The second Haidt book on my list, picking up some themes from the first one. The unique power of human beings is in our social skills.?If you wonder like me why people and societies are so divided and what it takes to overcome, read this book.?It will challenge you to rethink your opinions about left and right, religion and atheism, good and evil.

4.????Rana Foroohar: Don’t Be Evil; the Case against Big Tech?–?Remember the axiom “Don’t Be Evil” used by Google in its early, innocent years??Foroohar, the new editor of the FT, has written a readable and pertinent book arguing that "we ARE living in The Matrix” and that we urgently need to address and correct it.?Read this book together with Zuboff’s one and you will never go online the same way again.

5.????David Weinberger: Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a unified theory of the web?–?Another re-reread.?Weinberger wrote this book almost two decades ago when we still talked about “the internet” or “the web”. It’s both OF its time and AHEAD of its time, written when the Matrix movie came out, both sceptical and hopeful.

6.????Roger Bootle: The AI Economy; Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age?–?Finally a balanced analysis of the impact in the years ahead of AI on our economic lives. Bootle is an economist, not a tech guy, and the great virtue of this book is that he approached the topic as a student, with humility and looking at all sides. Well written and decidedly steering away from apocalyptic predictions.

7.????Rachel Botsman: Who Can You Trust?; how technology brought us together and why it could drive us apart?–?Botsman has written another very good book on trust; why trust increases in importance in our digital age, what trust is and how it works, and how it impacts our society. A very readable book with lots of examples, a must-read for those in leadership.

8.????Jonathan Haidt: The Happiness?Hypothesis, putting ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science?–?I first read this book almost 15 years ago.?I have an instinctive aversion from writings on wellness, mindfulness and the like, but this book is an exception.?It goes back to a wide range of disciplines (philosophy, sociology, biology, psychology, religion) to offer a practical set of rules on, well, yes, being happy.?I ‘happily’ look forward to reading it again this year!

9.????Barry Gewen: The Inevitability of Tragedy; Henry Kissinger and his World –?I’ve always been a collector of paradoxes.?Kissinger is certainly one of them.?Vain and disliked by many, yet also one of the most influential thinkers and actors in world affairs.?Yes, he has blood on his hands and his logic is cold and even cynical, yet he is not without morality and even tragic, as Gewen argues.?Gewen has written a thoughtful and human book, recommended!

10.?Carlo Rovelli: The Order of Time?– I loved this little, dense book.?Not a topic or a field I would normally read about but Rovelli makes physics understandable and even beautiful.?And once the seed is planted in your head that time is not a fixed thing, you’ll never look at the world in the same way.

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My 2019 Reading List

1. Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power -- For me THE non-fiction book of the year and essential reading to understand what is going on in our digital world. This book is dense and long, and the style is academic but the case Zuboff builds is vivid, convincing and deeply worrying. Her point is that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are undemocratic, undermine capitalism and societies and in the end our human freedom, and she argues for regulatory control and for digital business models that are not based on freely extracting data and monopolizing knowledge and power.
2. Andrew McAfee & Erik Brynjolfsson: Machine Platform Crowd, Harnessing our Digital Future -- This is a brilliant book, written by two MIT economists, finally makes sense of what's changing and not changing as the economy and everything else goes digital. A must-read to understand the principles of change.
3. Yuval Harari: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century -- The follow-on from Sapiens and Homo Deus. I liked it as much as the other two. Harari is smart and knows it but always makes you think. My favourite is lesson #17 on post-truth, where he makes the point that humans are story animals and prone to believe fake news.
4. Robert Skidelsky: Money and Government, A Challenge to Mainstream Economics -- A great and well-argued book, explaining why economics and economic policymaking has become so remarkably ineffective the last decade.
5. Paul Collier: The Future of Capitalism, Facing the New Anxieties -- A short, dense but ambitious book outlining ideas how to fix capitalism. Collier is a British economist, deeply concerned how our societies grew further apart after the 1970s. His central idea is that pragmatic ethical policies are needed to heal our social institutions -- the family, the firm and the nation -- a centre-left agenda reminiscent of the social-democratic policies that developed after WW2.
6. Francis Fukuyama: Identity; Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition – A smart, pertinent and well written book that puts our time of identity politics in a historical perspective and warns us not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
7. Tobias Straumann: 1931, Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler -- Very pertinent book on the lessons of the financial crisis in Weimar Germany, with eerie parallels to austerity, to Greece and now Italy. His point is that also in 1931 politicians knew what to do but under-estimated the importance of domestic politics and the limitations of democracies.
8. Paul Scheffer: De Vorm van Vrijheid -- This book is written in Dutch and I don't know if a translation is available or planned. Scheffer examines the role and significance of borders in today's world and makes the convincing point that open, democratic societies need some form of border.
9. Jared Diamond: Upheaval, How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change -- I liked this book, it is readable and tells stories how six nations overcame major crises and times of change. What makes it special is that it takes a psychological lens to analyze the lessons learned, including an analysis of today's issues in among others the US.
10. Simon Reid-Henry: Empire of Democracy, The Remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971-2017 -- This well-written book explains how we all moved from the anxious 1970s (abandonment of the gold standard, Watergate, oil crisis) via the bullish 1980s and '90s (Reagan/Thatcher economics, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Soviet Union) and the years of crisis after the turn of the century (9/11, Iraq, financial crisis) to the current crisis of democracy and liberalism.
11. Michael O'Sullivan: The Levelling, What's next after Globalization -- Like Collier and Reid-Henry, O'Sullivan is deeply concerned by the inequalities and imbalances in today's world and proposes new ways forward. The title refers to The Levellers in 17th century Cromwellian England, an idealistic grass-root movement advocating for -- at that time -- radical democracy. O'Sullivan then uses this to argue for an 'Agreement of the People' in our 21st century. O'Sullivan's manifesto is less tight than Collier's but is a pleasure to read and sweeps broadly.
12. Andrew McAfee: More from Less, the surprising story of how we learned to prosper using fewer resources - and what happens next -- An original and counterintuitive thesis that a digital world uses fewer resources, but ultimately a disappointing book, I thought, and thin on arguments and proof.